Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced this week that Canada will join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks, along with he United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, Mexico and, we hope, Japan. Some say this will be a historic free trade deal that will extend the NAFTA zone into emerging Asian markets; others believe the United States is using the process to impose its own draconian copyright regime on its trading partners, while protecting key industries, such as auto manufacturers. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that the agreement is being negotiated under a veil of heavy secrecy. And if rumours that the negotiated sections of the agreement already contain over 1,000 pages prove to be correct, it is certain that the TPP will not give us anything resembling real free trade. Indeed, the Canadian public has little idea about what we are getting ourselves into, or how much the government knew about what it was agreeing to. Based on a leaked chapter of the agreement, it looks as though we just signed up for an entirely new copyright regime, a mere hours after the government passed its own made-in-Canada solution.

To the government’s credit, it is simultaneously pursuing trade deals with the European Union and China. But in these times of global economic uncertainty, we need to see the benefits of trade sooner, rather than later. Free trade leads to higher standards of living, and benefits society through lower prices and increased variety of consumer goods; it forces domestic industries to be more efficient. Fortunately, there is another way to achieve these benefits: The Canadian government could open our borders to the world by unilaterally removing all our trade barriers.

It is said that if you put ten economists in a room, you will get ten different opinions. But as Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman wrote in his essay The Case for Free Trade, “Economists often do disagree, but that has not been true with respect to international trade.” Indeed, save a few economists employed by the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union, everyone from Paul Krugman to my Soviet-trained college econ professor who stopped one of his lectures to tell us that the command economy was about to make a comeback, has espoused the benefits of free trade.

As Friedman wrote, protection “really means exploiting the consumer.” Canada’s supply management policies alone cost consumers a great deal of money and disproportionately hurt low-income families. A recent study found the average Canadian family that consumes four litres of milk per week pays $300 more than their U.S. neighbours. A 2009 Conference Board of Canada report estimated that dairy production quotas cost the economy $28-billion per year — thousands of dollars per household.

Trade barriers not only hurt our economy, they act as a drag on the global economy as well. This is why, after examining the arguments against free trade, Friedman argues we should “move unilaterally to free trade, not instantaneously but over a period of, say, five years, at a pace announced in advance.” This would give domestic industries the time they need to adjust to the new market conditions.

He continues: “We could say to the rest of the world: ‘Our market is open to you without tariffs or other restrictions. Sell here what you can and wish to. Buy whatever you can and wish to. In that way co-operation among individuals can be worldwide and free.’ ”

A 2003 study conducted at the University of Michigan estimated that eliminating trade barriers worldwide would generate over $2-trillion (in 1995 U.S. dollars) worth of gains for the global economy, representing 6.2% of world GDP. And this does not include all the intangible gains, such as a greater diversity of products available to consumers and producers.

Free trade is a policy that is a no-brainer from an economics perspective, but can be very hard to achieve politically. There was a huge controversy in this country over the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, but in the end, both countries are better off. Yet, as anyone who has tried to do a little cross-border shopping knows, NAFTA is not real free trade. If it were, it wouldn’t contain 22 chapters of rules and regulations.

If Canada were to unilaterally pursue free trade, we could continue conducting bilateral negotiations to get other countries to reduce their trade barriers. We would certainly lose some leverage, but we’d gain something far more important: We’d set an example for the world and become a leader in the drive for a more open and free international trading regime.

By eliminating our trade barriers, we’d be saying to the world, in the words of Milton Friedman, “We cannot force you to be free. But we believe in freedom and we intend to practice it.”

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